


wild sage

by rolameny



Series: Destiny fics [10]
Category: Destiny (Video Games)
Genre: Friendship, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Post-Red War (Destiny)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-15
Updated: 2019-12-15
Packaged: 2021-02-25 21:08:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,396
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21801910
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rolameny/pseuds/rolameny
Summary: Everyone lost something in the Red War. Some losses might be more abstract than others, but that doesn't mean they hurt any less.Rust processes.
Relationships: Guardian & Guardian (Destiny)
Series: Destiny fics [10]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1052432
Comments: 4
Kudos: 38





	wild sage

**Author's Note:**

> Half of this has been knocking around a scrap file for half a year, since it was spring where I live and I sat by a lake and thought about grief. Now it's past fall into winter, and I'm still thinking.
> 
> Rust & Asaamu first show up in [Momentum](https://archiveofourown.org/works/11938347/chapters/26987079) (gen fic about their fireteam) and [Here I've Come To Hijack You](https://archiveofourown.org/works/14991785) (Asaamu's personal Eliksni romcom), but this shouldn't require their context.
> 
> Apologies, again, to the Mountain Goats for [stealing a lyric of theirs for a fic title](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O_V6D1Dd8Kc).

It's spring, somehow, in the northern hemisphere. Weather on Earth is always a surprise to Rust — that she can come back, over and over, and every time it will be different. She spends so much time out in the system skipping over planets like a rock over a pond that places start to seem static, like only the people change.

But here, at the edge of a lake big enough it could be a sea, new grass is showing green under last year's yellow. Shoots of spinmetal are coming up, gleaming needles sharp enough to stab through all but the thickest boots.

Rust wears her heaviest steel-toed pair and picks her careful way to the rocky shore. She climbs a series of boulders and concrete slabs, their gaps filled in with sea glass and everything else the water polishes smooth and throws back out: ceramic, inch-long pieces of orange brick, coal from old campfires further down the shore. She picks out a fishing lure gone ghostly with its paint washed off, its features blurred.

 _You could try catching a skeleton with that_ , her Ghost says in her mind. She smiles, and nudges the thought of a ghost on a fishing hook back at him — small-g ghost, a campfire-story ghost.

The lake clears her out, washes her as smooth as sea glass. Rust pulls off one glove and holds up a blue hand to the water, sees the wash of light under her skin slow to match the push and pull of the tide.

Further up the shore, someone transmats in with a green puff of light to announce their presence. Rust leans over to watch Asaamu pick his way over to her. He's like a stork with his long legs stabbing out like that, trying to avoid the spinmetal and goose shit.

 _Secretary bird_ , her Ghost offers from inside his little pocket of spacetime, and lets an image flower in her mind. This time she hides her smile.

"Hunter," she greets him, and makes space for him on her slab. He sweeps his cloak — edged in somber purple — out in a bow.

"Lady Guardian," he says, mock solemn, and scrambles on up next to her.

Rust tips her head against his shoulder. They look out at the water.

"It smells wet here. Wet and moldy," Asaamu says, eventually, his quiet voice half lost in the low rush of water on stone.

"That'll be all the mold."

Asaamu sighs in a huge sarcastic gust. Rust gives a grin at about half her usual volume.

"So what's up?"

This time Rust sighs. She straightens up, then hunches back down.

"Do you—" she made a whole little speech for this, tapping scripts out onto a hand console two-fingered, trying to work it out in text like she couldn't in her head. They all escape her now. "In the war. When the Light left us, and we got it back. How did you get yours?"

Asaamu frowns down at her, all the lines in his long face converging. "When the whole cage went down. Just — the Traveler cracked wide open and it was back. Like a sponge sitting dried-out on the side of the sink for months and then falling into a whole pan of water."

"And it felt like it did before?"

Some of the confusion in his eyes clears away. " _Oh_. Like how it came back sideways for some people — no, not me, thank the Light. It was disorienting but that was just getting used to having it again after so long, I think."

He holds a palm out flat. A spark of Light crackles across it, the same clear blue it's been as long as Rust's known him.

It feels like her eyes are made of rock and so's her trachea, weighing heavy inside. She closes her eyes against the sight and makes herself open them again.

Asaamu's looking at her. The Light in his hand is dancing towards her, radiating concern in little flickers of static electricity. She can't control her expression right now, so instead she holds up her own hand, the bare one, blue stark against the brown of Asaamu's.

She sparks her Light off his. A little bolt of lightning, a few inches high and thin as spidersilk, dances over her knuckles as she twists it.

Asaamu nods. Arc was the second kind of Light she ever learned to use, and she's comfortable with its logic; they make a thunderstorm of a pair sometimes in the Crucible.

Rust bites her lip and curls her hand over, letting the frequency of Light shift. The crawl of lightning sinks lower, its motion smoothing out, gaining a warmer tinge.

Solar Light. Strong and steady.

Asaamu looks right at her, eyes wide. Rust breathes out hard and lets the Light shift again. This time she reaches for void — that cool purple swirl that she first woke up to, her first day of her third life.

There's a single spark. It flickers, briefly, and pops out.

Asaamu's breath catches in his throat.

"Oh," he says. "Oh, Rust. That's what happened to you?"

Rust closes her hand. He gathers it up between his, long-boned and always warmer than hers.

She stares out at the lake. The movement of water doesn't help this time. She feels too heavy for it. It won't carry her with it this time.

"You didn't get it back?" Asaamu's voice is gentle.

Rust takes in a deep breath. He was right. Now that it's warm enough for things to start growing again, the shore does smell like mold.

She talks to their jumble of hands. "When we lost it — I was in the City. It took me weeks, but I heard about that shard in Europe and I got myself over there. It was the only thing I could think of. Selfish of me."

Asaamu squeezes her hand. In her mind, her Ghost flashes a firm negation.

"It gave me some Light back — arc energy, limited, I couldn't touch void. I talked to the other Guardians who gathered at Hawthorne's farm, and they were all limited in what they could do, too, so we thought: alright. That's how it works."

She takes a breath. "But then the chains came off the Traveler, and still. I couldn't touch the void. I tried. I went to the Reef. Back to Old Russia. Went to Io. Meditated in every ruin listed in the libraries. Tried the Crucible too. Then I went to Mercury — you remember."

Asaamu nods. "The one time you told us where you were going," he says, trying to make a joke of it. 

"I always told you when I could," Rust says, and he untangles their hands to set one on the back of her neck and pull her closer.

"I know that. Cix knows that. Orha knows it, and so does Nhour, even though she doesn't sound like it."

"Nhour just likes making noise," Asaamu's Ghost says from where they're tucked into his pocket. "You don't have to listen to the noise. I don't."

Rust breathes in again. She tries to match it to the rhythm of the lake. "Right as usual, Vega."

She knows she's been disappearing on her fireteam a lot. Some of it is — other people's secrets. But some of them have been her own. She couldn't say _I'm flying across the solar system to talk to the hermit of Pluto because I miss the way a nova bomb feels behind my teeth_.

She couldn't make herself talk about it. Her Ghost gives her a nudge.

"I went to Mercury," she says again. "I had gone before when Ikora wanted me to meditate with the Sunbreakers. Before I ever touched arc Light."

Asaamu gives her a startled look. "Your Vanguard sent you to train with _heretics_ on _Mercury_?"

"Right hand lays down the rule of the game. Left hand palms a few pieces." She smiles, tired. "It's politics."

The hunter Vanguard always kept secrets, everyone knew that, and some people knew the warlock Vanguard kept their hand in too. Did Zavala do the same?

"This time, though," Rust says, before she can dissemble herself out of the conversation entirely. "This time I ran into some trouble by the Lighthouse. I reached for the Light. I expected arc, I was ready for arc. But that place, it's like a mirror, you know. The sand and Sol and you pinned in between. It beats at you. And I reached out, and what came to hand was… this."

Rust pulls her hands out of Asaamu's grip. She lets the Light come to her. It's quick now, easy, muscle reflex, not thought.

A sword made of fire lies across her palms. A sabre, curved, no guard to its grip, with a tassel dangling from the hilt to lick flame against her legs.

Asaamu pulls away to stare at it. Some Dawnblades are uncontrolled, a handful of fire dragged like taffy out into a messy length. This one's clean enough to have a visible cutting edge.

"I've never gotten my spears that tidy," he blurts out.

"I _know_ ," Rust says, hating how her voice hitches on the second word. "I tried for a _year_ to touch the Sun at all and never got more than a handful, and now I can't get even a handful of void but I've got a textbook Dawnblade. I h— I don't _want_ it."

Asaamu's hand settles on her back to rub careful circles. She doesn't hate the Light, she doesn't hate hers, she'd have been so proud a year ago to be able to show any Dawnblade at all to Ikora Rey. But its presence doesn't make up for that hollow inside her, the emptiness where void Light would spark off her heels and fingers and teeth. It had been with her as long as her Ghost, a third part of herself.

And now it's gone. Voided of void, a double negative, exchanging itself for something she had wanted once more than anything.

Rust doesn't want it now, this line straight to their Sun. She does want it. She doesn't want to want it, doesn't want to not want it.

She just wants the void back.

"We all lost something in the War," Asaamu says, finally, when she's back to herself. "Light, our stuff, our people. The life we had before it. It's not arithmetic, any of it. Getting one thing doesn't cancel out what you lost before it."

Asaamu doesn't like to talk about the Red War. He doesn't like to talk about most difficult things, prefers to skate above them, pretending there's no dark water under the ice.

That doesn't mean he doesn't think about it.

Rust stares blurrily out at the shoreline past the fence of their propped-up knees. "You're probably right," she says. "But right doesn't make it easy."

"Hey, when did I promise _easy_?" 

When Rust looks up at him, his smile is watery. He puts a hand over hers. "C'mon. Put that thing away or you're going to burn a hole in my clothing. And I will forward you the dry-cleaning bill."

Rust hadn't even noticed her Dawnblade was still in her hand. It dissipates, leaving the damp cold of the air to press against her legs in its wake.

Her ungloved hand misses her blade's warmth now that it's gone.

In its absence, she tucks herself more firmly against Asaamu. He'd been her first friend when she hit the Tower, two days old and confused by anything. He had most of a century on her, had been through loss she couldn't imagine. Nobody lived without collecting scars.

"I don't know what to do." It isn't a request — just a bubble of helpless truth rising up, pushing its way out of Rust.

"You got one thing right. You asked for help."

Asaamu offers her a small smile. Trying his best. His right hand reaches out again, stopping just beyond their knees. Light sparks in his open palm, pale blue, flickering first deeper — deeper — and into indigo, its movement slowing from arc jitters to the endless swirling of void Light. It's barely enough to light his palm, a little weightless marble. 

Rust lifts her hand up, hovering next to his like she's trying to protect a match she's lighting. She can feel his Light on her palm, pulsing cool but friendly.

She closes her eyes, and lets her Light feed his. Her Ghost is a quiet presence in her mind, Asaamu warm at her shoulder. The cool Light presses more insistently against her palm. When she opens her eyes again, the marble's gotten bigger — big enough Asaamu's got both hands supporting it now. Rust adds her other hand, too, and its colour deepens, to a clear, rich violet. 

Rust's breath catches in her throat. Asaamu nudges at her with his shoulder in wordless support, all four of their hands occupied with this delicate bubble of Light. It's got no intention in it, not to hurt or heal or trap, no goal but existence.

Supporting it means she doesn't have a hand clear to wipe her eyes. That seems unfair somehow.

They can't hold it forever, even with the two of them. They feel it together, that it'll pop if they force it too much longer. Instead they open their hands. It hovers in the air, a glass float without a net to support. It drifts in the air, slow and aimless, out towards the water. A yard out past the hems of the tide's carpet, it dissolves back into the ambient Light of the living world around it.

Rust's hands are clenched in her lap. She stares at the spot where the void Light isn't anymore.

On her left Asaamu shifts awkwardly, tugging at something. His cloak: he pulls it out from under himself and drapes part of it over Rust's shoulder.

"I'm not cold," she says, half-muffled now by the fabric, leaning as she is against his side.

"Alright. I am," he says, and hunkers down to rest his head against Rust's, sharp chin on her skull.

They sit there, tailbones going slowly numb from the uneven concrete under them, breathing in the heavy green smell of life returning to the shore after a winter in abeyance, and Asaamu doesn't even say anything when Rust uses his cloak to wipe, carefully, at her eyes.


End file.
